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"Successful people don't have problems, do they?"

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From the outside, Gina Field had it all together. She'd built a security company over 27 years - one of the most awarded in the state, 47 staff, large contracts. By every visible measure, she was successful.

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What no one saw was the wine.

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"Every day I'd come home from work and the first thing I'd do was pour a wine, because that was the normal thing to do," she says. By October 2024 she was drinking seven days a week - two bottles a day, twelve or thirteen across a weekend - and hiding all of it.

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"By the time I got to Monday morning, the whole weekend from Friday was just a blur."

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The hiding was bound up in a stigma she couldn't shake. "I was extremely embarrassed, because successful people don't have these problems, do they?"

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She never called herself an ‘alcoholic’, but she knew the drinking had stopped serving her. There were shakes every morning - "to the point where I couldn't even pick up a glass. I used to have to hold a glass with two hands" - missed deadlines, excuses, and whole hours that simply went missing from her days. There was also Monty, her chihuahua and the love of her life: he's twelve now, and for ten of those years, she says, she can't even remember whether he came up to bed with her at night.

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The point of no return

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The light-bulb moment came in October 2024. Gina had been invited to an important function - a ticketed event she calls the opportunity of a lifetime. She went into Double Bay for a new pair of shoes, stopped for lunch, and started drinking.

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"I got to the point - I call it the point of no return." She messaged to say she couldn't come. The reply: "Gina, how could you?"

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That night she woke at three in the morning the way she always did, with heart palpitations and sweats. She picked up her phone, and there on Facebook was an ad for Clean Slate.

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"It was like an epiphany. I thought, 'You know what? I'll just fill it out.'"

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The questionnaire told her she was a suitable candidate.

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"It was my last hope"

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By then, Gina had tried everything - apps, books, mentorships, meditation, hypnosis. "You name it, I paid for it, I signed up for it." None of it had helped.

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"Clean Slate was my absolute last hope. I didn't know if it was going to work - but it was my last hope, and my only hope."

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Two things drew her in: it was an in-home program, so she didn't have to step out of her business, and it was, in her words, "no fluff." "I needed someone to tell me the truth."

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Her nurse, Leona, gave her exactly that. Gina recalls Leona telling her: "You've got to do it. I can't do it for you. You have to want this."

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The program

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Every morning at eight during the detox week, Gina checked in with Leona over video call, showed a zero reading on her breathalyser, and took her medication.

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That medication mattered, because withdrawals were the thing that had always broken her on day one. This time she rode them out. By day six, Leona told her: "I think you're going to do this. I can see the determination."

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Then came the aftercare phase - which frightened her, because she'd never made it past day one or two before. What carried her through was connection: nightly peer-support group meetings with people at every stage of the same journey.

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"I'm on a call with normal people like me. Not this perception of living under a bridge. Normal people, who've had all the same challenges with alcohol as me."

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For someone who'd spent years hiding, belonging somewhere - with no judgment, and no way to lie about whether she'd had a drink - changed everything. She nominated her husband as her support person, Clean Slate onboarded him on how to help, and he gave up drinking too. She made it to three months, and stayed stopped: glasses and alcohol out of the house, the fridge filled with water, and a firm "no" to non-alcoholic substitutes, because for her the habit was the wine glass itself.

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Life on the other side

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Today, Gina has the tools to support her long-term recovery and checks in regularly with her support team. She keeps a photo of day one stuck to her computer, and when the fear of missing out shows up she asks herself one question: what's my why?

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The change is hard to overstate. Her physical health has improved, the puffiness has left her face, she's sleeping properly - and she's found, by her own count, eight to ten hours a day that used to vanish into the blur.

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That recovered time has let her say yes to a life she'd once have handed to someone else. Her media career took off, with appearances on Channel 7's Sunrise and radio interviews as a security expert. The one she remembers most was a New Year's Day segment that meant being up at three in the morning.

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"Twelve months ago at 3am, I would have still been drinking."

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Instead she woke with no hangover and did it. "It was the best feeling in the world."

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Then came the awards. In 2025 her company won the Services category at the Australian Small Business Champion Awards, and she went on to win Company of the Year at the Women Changing the World Global Awards - an honour she'd applied for by being honest, for the first time on paper, about her drinking and how far she'd come. A week before sitting down to tell this story, she signed on to write her first book.

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"My business is my second marriage. I've burped it from the nappy stage, and now it's this teenager just flourishing."

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"I'm a normal person, just like you"

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Gina's message is shaped by the stigma that nearly kept her drinking. "It's okay to say, 'I need help.' I'm out there in the community, I'm on TV - I couldn't say I had a problem. But eventually I said it. And that's okay."

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"I'm a normal person. I'm not a paid actor, I promise you that. I was exactly like you - lying awake going, 'This is enough.' I signed up, and it's helped me. Here I am."

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Her advice is as no-fluff as the program that changed her life. "If you're really considering changing your relationship with alcohol - just take the quiz. Just do it."

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If this story brings up difficult feelings for you, or if you or someone you know is struggling, support is available. Please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 (24/7) or visit lifeline.org.au.

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